Compliance, Operational Risk & Defense (CORD) Index
A proprietary assessment framework for organizations that need to prove their security posture, paired with a 12-month roadmap, paced to your ideal timeline.
Audit and certification readiness
Access and defense gaps surfaced before a partner or investor finds them
Nearshore logistics and economics
The CORD Index is the first step in First Factory's comprehensive engagement framework for organizations facing an audit, a certification requirement, or a breach they cannot afford to have. Delivered by consultants holding active security and compliance certifications, the CORD Index gives organizations a structured, scored view of where their compliance, access, defense, and resilience posture stands today, and a prioritized roadmap to close every loose end. The assessment spans five dimensions, produces a composite score, and results in a set of concrete client deliverables, designed to inform the most effective path forward.
Five Dimensions of Assessment
Every CORD engagement evaluates an organization's security and compliance posture across five interconnected dimensions. Each is scored independently, then combined into a composite score used to determine the recommended engagement tier.
Expert guidance to evaluate software solutions, compare build vs. buy options, and optimize your development processes through strategic analysis and recommendations.
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Dedicated full-time resources who integrate seamlessly into your existing team, working in your time zone and participating in all your Agile ceremonies and workflows.
Self-organizing teams of developers, testers, and a product owner who deliver software in two-week sprints with regular demos and continuous stakeholder collaboration.
Fixed-price custom development with clearly defined scope, scheduled demos, and guaranteed pricing that includes UAT windows and post-release support.
Ongoing maintenance and support agreements available as fixed-price annual contracts or hourly arrangements with specific SLAs tailored to your post-launch needs.
Trusted by SaaS vendors, offering structured, repeatable, high-volume implementations that quickly deliver customer value without burdening internal vendor teams.
01 Governance & Compliance
We assess whether your security program exists on paper and in practice: a selected framework, written policies, assigned ownership, and an evidence trail an auditor can follow. We score what can be shown, not what is intended. A policy no one has adopted counts the same as having no policy.
02 Identity & Access Management
We assess how effectively the organization governs the identity lifecycle, manages access to systems and data, and ensures that access remains appropriate, secure, and aligned with business responsibilities. We trace access from provisioning through offboarding and score whether anyone is watching it.
03 Security Operations
We evaluate the organization's ability to continuously detect, manage, and improve its cybersecurity posture through effective operational processes, monitoring, vulnerability management, and security oversight.
04 Risk & Third-Party Management
We evaluate whether you have identified the risks that matter, and whether you know which vendors could expose your data or your customers. Every SaaS tool, API, and integration extends your attack surface. A vendor's breach becomes your incident the moment its access touches your data. We score whether risk is tracked on purpose or discovered after the fact.
05 Operational Resilience & Incident Response
We evaluate the organization's preparedness to respond to, recover from, and continuously improve following cybersecurity incidents or business disruptions, ensuring operational continuity and organizational resilience. We look for recovery objectives that have been measured, playbooks that have been exercised, and clear ownership of every decision in the first hour of an incident.
Scoring Tiers
Each of the five dimensions is scored from 0 to 100. A composite score is calculated and mapped to one of three engagement tiers. The tier determines First Factory’s recommended next step, so the path forward matches where you actually are.
75–100
40–74
Score: 0–39
What You Receive
Every CORD engagement concludes with a structured set of deliverables designed for two audiences: the technical and compliance teams who will execute on recommendations, and the executive stakeholders who will fund them. All deliverables are produced by the same certified practitioners who conducted the assessment.
Expert guidance to evaluate software solutions, compare build vs. buy options, and optimize your development processes through strategic analysis and recommendations.
Dedicated full-time resources who integrate seamlessly into your existing team, working in your time zone and participating in all your Agile ceremonies and workflows.
Self-organizing teams of developers, testers, and a product owner who deliver software in two-week sprints with regular demos and continuous stakeholder collaboration.
Fixed-price custom development with clearly defined scope, scheduled demos, and guaranteed pricing that includes UAT windows and post-release support.
Ongoing maintenance and support agreements available as fixed-price annual contracts or hourly arrangements with specific SLAs tailored to your post-launch needs.
Trusted by SaaS vendors, offering structured, repeatable, high-volume implementations that quickly deliver customer value without burdening internal vendor teams.
Delivered by Certified Practitioners
Every CORD Index engagement is led by First Factory consultants holding active security and compliance certifications. Clients receive findings from practitioners who can also execute on them, not generalist account managers who hand off to a delivery team they've never met.
First Factory is a Select partner in the Claude Partner Network. We are also an AWS certified partner and are SOC2 Type 2 certified, meaning we hold ourselves to the same securitystandards we assess in your environment. This matters when we're reviewing your access controls, your incident response plan, or your evidence repository. You can trust that we approach those areas with the same rigor we apply to our own operations.
